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Mobile App Designer

Back in August a new Oracle mobile solution jumped out of the gate, the Mobile App Designer (MAD). I seem to have been on the road every week for the last, goodness knows how many weeks. I have finally found some time this week to get down and work with it. Its pretty cool and above all, its capable of providing a mobile platform independent reporting solution.

But you already have a mobile application! Yep, and I think they both sit quite comfortably together. The Oracle BI Mobile Application is available from the App Store for Apple users. Its a great app, build reports, dashboards and BIP reports for your browser based users and your Apple app users can take advantage of them immediately.

MAD takes the next step forward. Maybe you don't use or can not use Apple mobile devices? Maybe you need to build something more specific around a business area that provides users with a richer experience, beyond what Answers and Dashboards can offer. However, you do not want to have to rely of the tech folks to build the mobile application, thats just piling more work on them. You also want to be platform agnostic, you might have a mix of mobile platforms. MAD can help.

For those of you that have already used the Online Template layout editor with BI Publisher, you already know how to build a mobile application. The MAD interface is essentially the online template builder user interface, tweaked for a mobile destination ie a phone or tablet.

You build your data model as you would normally including the newer direct data model build on a subject area from OBIEE.

Then start to create the 'pages' of your application and the content to sit on those pages. All the normal stuff, tables, pivot tables, charts, images plus accordians, filters and repeating objects. On top of that is the ability to then extend the visual objects that are available to users. Maps (google or oracle), D3 visuals, gantt charts, org charts, if you can either write the code or leverage an existing javascript library, MAD has the extension framework to support it.

You can build and test in a browser and then deploy to your own BI App Store. Users, on their mobile devices, can then subscribe to an application. They can open and interact with your app using their phone or tablet's interactive features just as they would with a native application. As you update your app and add new features the changes will be picked up the next time your users open the application.

Interested? Want to know more? The Oracle MAD home page has a ton of content including tutorials, etc. We are planning to dig into MAD in forthcoming posts. The geek in me wanted to be able to build plugins using the D3 and other visuals. I have been working with Leslie on some of the documentation and we'll be sharing some of that 'plugin' doc and how tos in the coming weeks.

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